By mid-morning I had traveled two or three miles, arriving somewhere in Brentford. Here I found a wide, shallow lake, from which flowed our stream and a number of others, and the lake was fed in turn by a series of minor brooks and rivers. The trees grew close around this secluded body of water, and climbing plants clung to their trunks and lower branches, including some I recognized as bottle gourds and loofahs. The water was warm and brackish, and I was wary of drinking it, but the lagoon teemed with life. Its surface was covered by groupings of giant lilies, shaped like upturned bottle-tops and perhaps six feet wide, which reminded me of plants I had once seen in Turner’s Waterlily House in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. (It was ironic, I thought, that the eventual site of Kew itself was less than a mile from where I stood!) The lilies’ saucers looked strong and buoyant enough for me to stand on, but I did not put this hypothesis to the test.
It was the work of a few minutes to improvise a fishing rod, made from the long, straight trunk of a sapling. I fixed a line to this, and I baited a hook of Time-Car metal with grubs.
I was rewarded within a few minutes by brisk tugs of the line. I grinned to imagine the envy of some of my angling friends — dear old Filby, for instance — at my discovery of this un-fished oasis.
I built a fire and ate well that night of broiled fish and tubers.
A little before dawn I was woken by a strange hooting. I sat up and looked about me. My fire had more or less died. The sun was not yet up; the sky had that unearthly tinge of steel blue which prefigures a new day. There was no wind, and not a leaf stirred; a heavy mist lay immobile on the surface of the water.
Then I made out a group of birds, a hundred yards from me around the rim of the lake. Their feathers were dun brown and each had legs as long as a flamingo’s. They stepped about the waters of the lake’s margin, or stood poised on one leg like exquisite sculptures. They had heads shaped like those of modern ducks, and they would dip those familiar-looking beaks through the shimmering surface and sweep through the water, evidently filtering for food.
The mist lifted a little, and more of the lake was revealed; I saw now that there was a great flock of these creatures (which Nebogipfel later identified as Presbyornis) — thousands of them, in a great, open colony. They moved like ghosts through that vaporous haze.
I told myself that this location was nowhere more exotic than the junction of Gunnersbury Avenue with the Chiswick High Road — but a vision more unlike England it is hard to conjure!
As the days wore on in that sultry, vital landscape, my memories of the England of 1891 seemed more and more remote and irrelevant. I found the greatest of satisfactions in my building, hunting and gathering; and the bathing warmth of the sun and the Sea’s freshness were combining to give me a sense of health, strength and immediacy of sensory experience lost since childhood. I had done with Thinking, I decided; there were but two conscious Minds in all this elaborate panoply of Palaeocene life, and I could not see that mine would do me much good from now on, save for keeping me alive a little longer.
It was time for the Heart, and the Body, to have their say. And the more the days wore away, the more I gathered a sense of the greatness of the world, the immensity of time — and the littleness of myself and my concerns in the face of that great Multiple panorama of History. I was no longer important, even to myself; and that realization was like a liberation of the soul.
After a time, even the death of Moses ceased to clamor at my thoughts.
[7]
Pristichampus
Nebogipfel’s screaming woke me with a start. A Morlock’s voice, raised, is a kind of gurgle: queer, but quite chilling to hear.
I sat up in the cool darkness; and for an instant I imagined I was back in my bed in my house on the Petersham Road, but the scents and textures of the Palaeocene night came crowding in on me.
I scrambled out of my pallet and jumped down, off the floor of the shelter, and to the sand. It had been a moonless night; and the last stars were fading from the sky as the sun approached. The sea rolled, placid, and the wall of forest was black and still.
In the midst of this cool, blue-soaked tranquillity, the Morlock came limping towards me along the beach. He had lost his crutch, and, it seemed to me, he could barely stay upright, let alone run. His hair was ragged and flying, and he had lost his face-mask; even as he ran I could see how he was forced to raise his hands to cover his huge, sensitive eyes.
And behind him, chasing -
It was perhaps ten feet in length, in general layout something like a crocodile; but its legs were long and supple, giving it a raised, horse-like gait, quite unlike the squat motion of the crocodiles of my time — this beast was evidently adapted to running and chasing. Its slit eyes were fixed on the Morlock, and when it opened its mouth I saw rows of saw-edge teeth.
This apparition was bare yards from Nebogipfel!
I screamed and ran at the little tableau, waving my arms, but even as I did so I knew it was all up for Nebogipfel. I grieved for the lost Morlock, but — I am ashamed to record it — my first thought was for myself, for with his death I should be left alone, here in the mindless Palaeocene…
And it was at that moment, with a startling clarity, that a rifle-shot rang out from the margin of the forest.
The first bullet missed the beast, I think; but it was enough to make that great head turn, and to slow the pumping of those mighty thighs.
The Morlock fell, now, and went sprawling in the sand; but he pushed himself up on his elbows and squirmed onwards, on his belly.
There was a second shot, and a third. The crocodile flinched as the bullets pounded into its body. It faced the forest with defiance, opened his saw-toothed mouth and emitted a roar which echoed like thunder from the trees. Then it set off on its long, determined legs towards the source of these unexpected stings.
A man — short, compact, wearing a drab uniform — emerged from the forest’s margin. He raised the rifle again, sighted along it at the crocodile, and held his nerve as the beast approached.
I reached Nebogipfel now and hauled him to his feet; he was shivering. We stood on the sand together, and waited for the drama to play itself out.
The crocodile could have been no more than ten yards away from the man when the rifle spoke again. The crocodile stumbled — I could see blood streaming from its mouth but it raised itself up with barely a sliver of its momentum lost. The rifle shouted, and bullet after bullet plunged into that immense carcass.
At last, less than ten feet from the man, the thing tumbled, its great jaws snapping at the air; and the man — as cool as you like! — stepped neatly aside to let it fall.
I found Nebogipfel’s mask for him, and the Morlock and I followed the trail of the crocodile up the slope of the beach. Its claws had scuffed up the sand, and the last few pace-marks were strewn with saliva, mucus and steaming blood. Close to, the crocodile-thing was even more intimidating than from a distance; the eyes and jaw were open and staring, and as the last echoes of life seeped from the monster the huge muscles of its rear legs twitched, and hoofed feet scuffed at the sand.
The Morlock studied the hot carcass. “Pristichampus,” he said in his low gurgle.
Our savior stood with his foot on the twitching corpse of the beast. He was aged perhaps twenty-five: he was clean jawed and with a straightforward gaze. Despite his brush with death, he looked quite relaxed; he favored us with an engaging, gap-toothed grin. His uniform consisted of brown trousers, heavy boots, and a brown khaki jacket; a blue beret perched jauntily on his head. This visitor could have come from any Age, or any variant of History, I supposed; but it did not surprise me at all when this young man said, in straightforward, neutrally-accented English, “Damn ugly thing, isn’t it? Tough fellow, though — did you see I had to plug him in the mouth before he fell? And even then he kept on coming. Got to give him credit — he was game enough!”
Before his relaxed, Officer-class manners, I felt clumsy, rather oafish in my skins and be
ard. I extended my hand. “Sir, I think I owe you the life of my companion.”
He took the hand and shook it. “Think nothing of it.” His grin widened. “Mr. — , I presume,” he said, naming me. “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to say that!”
“And you are?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. The name’s Gibson. Wing Commander Guy Gibson. And I’m delighted to have found you.”
[8]
The Encampment
It transpired that Gibson was not alone. He shouldered his rifle, turned and made a beckoning gesture towards the shadows of the jungle.
Two soldiers emerged from that gloom. Sweat had soaked through the shirts of these laden fellows, and, as they stepped into the growing light of the day, they seemed altogether more suspicious of us, and generally uncomfortable, than had the Wing Commander. These two were Indians, I thought — sepoys, soldiers of the Empire — their eyes glittered black and fierce, and each had a turban and clipped beard. They wore khaki drill shirts and shorts; one of them carried a heavy mechanical gun at his back, and bore two heavy leather pouches, evidently holding ammunition for this weapon. Their heavy, silvery epaulets glittered in the Palaeocene sunlight; they scowled at the corpse of Pristichampus with undisguised ferocity.
Gibson told us that he and these two fellows had been involved in a scouting expedition; they had traveled perhaps a mile from a main base, camp, which was situated inland from the Sea. (It struck me as odd that Gibson did not introduce the two soldiers by name. This little incivility — brought on by an unspoken recognition, by Gibson, of differences of rank — seemed to me altogether absurd, there on that isolated beach in the Palaeocene, with only a handful of humans anywhere in the world!)
I thanked Gibson again for rescuing the Morlock, and invited him to join us for some breakfast at our shelter. “It’s just along the beach,” I said, pointing; and Gibson peaked his hand over his eyes to see.
“Well, that looks — ah — as if it’s going to be a jolly solid construction.”
“Solid? I should say so,” I replied, and began a long and rather rambling discourse on the details of our incomplete shelter, of which I felt inordinately proud, and of how we had survived in the Palaeocene.
Guy Gibson folded his hands behind his back and listened, with a set, polite expression on his face. The sepoys watched me, puzzled and suspicious, their hands never far from their weapons.
After some minutes of this, I became aware, rather belatedly, of Gibson’s detachment. I let my prattle slow to a halt.
Gibson glanced around brightly at the beach. “I think you’ve done remarkably well here. Remarkably. I should have thought that a few weeks of this Robinson Crusoe stuff would pretty much have driven me batty with loneliness. I mean, opening time at the pub won’t be for another fifty million years!”
I smiled at this joke — which I failed to follow — and I felt rather embarrassed at my exaggerated pride at such mean achievements, before this vision of dapper competence.
“But look here,” Gibson went on gently, “don’t you think you’d be better off coming back with us to the Expeditionary Force? We have traveled here to find you, after all. And we’ve some decent provisions there — and modern tools, and so forth.” He glanced at Nebogipfel, and added, a little more dubiously, “And the doc might be able to do something for this poor chap as well. Is there anything you need here? We can always come back later.”
Of course there was not — I had no need to return through those few hundred yards along the beach ever again! — but I knew that, with the arrival of Gibson and his people, my brief idyll was done. I looked into Gibson’s frank, practical face, and knew that I could never find the words to express such a sense of loss to him.
With the sepoys leading the way, and with the Morlock supporting himself against my arm, we set off into the interior of the jungle.
Away from the coast, the air was hot and clammy. We moved in single file, with the sepoys at front and back, and Gibson, the Morlock, and myself sandwiched between; I carried the frail Morlock in my arms for much of the journey. The two sepoys kept up their suspicious, hooded glares at us, although after a time they allowed their hands to stray from their webbing holsters. They said not a single word to Nebogipfel or me, in the whole time we traveled together.
Gibson’s expedition had come from 1944 — six years after our own departure, during the German assault on the London Dome.
“And the War is still continuing?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said, sounding grim. “Of course we responded for that brutal attack on London. Paid them back in spades.”
“You were involved in such actions yourself?”
As he walked, he glanced down — apparently involuntarily — at the service ribbons sewn to the chest of his tunic. I did not recognize these at the time — I am no military buff, and in any case some of these awards hadn’t even been devised in my day — but I learned later that they constituted the Distinguished Service Order, and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar: high awards indeed, especially for one so young. Gibson said without drama, “I saw a bit of action, yes. A good few sorties. Pretty lucky to be here to talk about it — plenty of good chaps who aren’t.”
“And these sorties were effective?”
“I’ll say. We broke open their Domes for them, without much of a delay after they did us the same favor!”
“And the cities underneath?”
He eyed me. “What do you think? Without its Dome, a city is pretty much defenseless against attack from the air. Oh, you can throw up a barrage from your eighty-eights—”
“ ’Eighty-eights’?”
“The Germans have an eight-point-eight centimeter Flat 36 anti-aircraft gun — pretty useful as a field gun and anti ’Naut, as well as its main purpose: good bit of design… Anyway, if your bomber pilot can get in under such flak he can pretty much dump what he likes into the guts of an un-Domed city.”
“And the results — after six more years of all this?”
He shrugged. “There’s not much in the way of cities left, I suppose. Not in Europe, anyway.”
We reached the vicinity of South Hampstead, I estimated. Here, we broke through a line of trees into a clearing. This was a circular space perhaps a quarter-mile across, but it was not natural: the tree-stumps at its edge showed how the forest had been blasted back, or cut away. Even as we approached, I could see squads of bare-chested infantrymen hacking their way further into the undergrowth with saws and machetes, extending the space. The earth in the clearing was stripped of undergrowth and hardened by several layers of palm fronds, all stamped down into the mud.
At the heart of this clearing sat four of the great Juggernaut machines which I had encountered before, in 1873 and 1938. These beasts sat at four sides of a square a hundred feet across, immobile, their ports gaping like the mouths of thirsty animals; their anti-mine flails hung limp and useless from the drums held out before them, and the mottled green and black coloration of their metal hides was encrusted with guano and fallen leaves. There were a series of other vehicles and items of material scattered around the encampment, including light armored cars, and small artillery pieces mounted on thick-wheeled trolleys.
This, Gibson gave me to understand, would be the site of a sort of graving-yard for time-traveling Juggernauts, in 1944.
Soldiers worked everywhere, but when I walked into the clearing beside Gibson, and with the limping Nebogipfel leaning against me, to a man the troopers ceased their laboring and stared at us with undiluted curiosity.
We reached the courtyard enclosed by the four ’Nauts. At the center of this square there was a white-painted flag-pole; and from this a Union Flag dangled, gaudy, limp and incongruous. A series of tents had been set up in this yard; Gibson invited us to sit on canvas stools beside the grandest of these. A soldier — thin, pale and evidently uncomfortable in the heat — emerged from one of the ’Nauts. I took this fellow to be Gibson’s batman, for the Wing Commander ordere
d him to bring us some refreshment.
The work of the camp proceeded all around us as we sat there; it was a hive of activity, as military sites always seem endlessly to be. Most of the soldiers wore a full kit of a jungle-green twill shirt and trousers with anklets; on their heads they had soft felt hats with puggrees of light khaki, or else bush hats of (Gibson said) an Australian design. They wore their divisional insignia sewn into their shirts or hats, and most of them carried weaponry: leather bandoliers for small-arms ammunition, web pouches, and the like. They all bore the heavy epaulets I remembered from 1938. In the heat and moisture, most of these troopers were fairly disheveled.
I saw one chap in a suit of pure white which enclosed him head to foot; he wore thick gloves, and a soft helmet which enclosed his head, with an inset visor through which he peered. He worked at the opened side-panels of one of the Juggernauts. The poor fellow must have been melting of the heat in such an enclosure, I surmised; Gibson explained that the suit was of asbestos, to protect him from engine fires.
Not all the soldiers were men — I should think two-fifths of the hundred or so personnel were female — and many of the soldiers bore wounds of one sort or another: burn scars and the like, and even, here and there, prosthetic sections of limb. I realized that the dreadful attrition of the youth of Europe had continued since 1938, necessitating the call-up of those wounded already, and more of the young women.
Gibson took off his heavy boots and massaged his cramped feet with a rueful grin at me. Nebogipfel sipped from a glass of water, while the batman provided Gibson and me with a cup of traditional English breakfast tea — tea, there in the Palaeocene!
“You have made quite a little colony,” I said to Gibson.
The Time Ships Page 30